f your car starts to smoke and sputter, you’d take it to an auto repair shop right away. The U.S. patent system — the engine driving the country’s innovation economy for more than 200 years — is sputtering and smoking. Yet its path to the mechanic is being blocked by an inane Supreme Court ruling.
American innovators are no longer promised reliable and effective rights for the fruits of their labors. In 2014, the Supreme Court reinterpreted laws that have been enacted by Congress since 1790 and created a stricter test for receiving patents for innovations in health care and high tech. This test makes it incredibly easy for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to reject applications, or for judges to invalidate patents already granted by the office.
The Supreme Court’s two-step test requires, first, that a patent does not cover an abstract idea or law of nature, like Einstein’s discovery of E=mc2. Abstractions like it are not patentable technologies — the “useful arts” that the Constitution authorizes Congress to promote with the patent laws. In the second step, if an application does claim an abstract idea, it might still be valid if it contains an additional “inventive concept” that applies this abstraction in an eligible technology. For example, physicists Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard applied E=mc2 to invent a nuclear reactor, for which they received a patent in 1955.
Since 2014, courts have used the Supreme Court’s tests to find numerous discoveries or...
Russian military command has been lying for the fifth month in a row about battlefield “successes,” claiming that Russian forces are advancing west of Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region. However, this...